Nigeria is almost at the advanced stage to start deploying the fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks from January 2022, the Minister of Communication and Digital Eeconomy, Isa Pantami has said.
He revealed this during a town hall meeting in Maiduguri, Borno state, on Thursday through his representative, Ubale Maska, NCC commissioner for technical services.
He said the deployment became necessary as there are over 50,000 telecommunications sites across the country and about 16,000 outages recorded by mobile network operators (MTN, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile) between January 2021 and July 2021.
Pantami blamed the outages on fibre cuts, access denial and theft, leading to service disruption in the affected areas.
The Minister who condemned situations where telecoms installations were destroyed in terrorist attacks which had not been replaced as a result of the intense security issues and tensions in north-east states, urged the national assembly to speed up the passage of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Bill for onward submission to Muhammadu Buhari for assent.